- Beautiful Soup Tutorial
- Beautiful Soup - Home
- Beautiful Soup - Overview
- Beautiful Soup - Web Scraping
- Beautiful Soup - Installation
- Beautiful Soup - Souping the Page
- Beautiful Soup - Kinds of objects
- Beautiful Soup - Inspect Data Source
- Beautiful Soup - Scrape HTML Content
- Beautiful Soup - Navigating by Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Find Elements by ID
- Beautiful Soup - Find Elements by Class
- Beautiful Soup - Find Elements by Attribute
- Beautiful Soup - Searching the Tree
- Beautiful Soup - Modifying the Tree
- Beautiful Soup - Parsing a Section of a Document
- Beautiful Soup - Find all Children of an Element
- Beautiful Soup - Find Element using CSS Selectors
- Beautiful Soup - Find all Comments
- Beautiful Soup - Scraping List from HTML
- Beautiful Soup - Scraping Paragraphs from HTML
- BeautifulSoup - Scraping Link from HTML
- Beautiful Soup - Get all HTML Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Get Text Inside Tag
- Beautiful Soup - Find all Headings
- Beautiful Soup - Extract Title Tag
- Beautiful Soup - Extract Email IDs
- Beautiful Soup - Scrape Nested Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Parsing Tables
- Beautiful Soup - Selecting nth Child
- Beautiful Soup - Search by text inside a Tag
- Beautiful Soup - Remove HTML Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Remove all Styles
- Beautiful Soup - Remove all Scripts
- Beautiful Soup - Remove Empty Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Remove Child Elements
- Beautiful Soup - find vs find_all
- Beautiful Soup - Specifying the Parser
- Beautiful Soup - Comparing Objects
- Beautiful Soup - Copying Objects
- Beautiful Soup - Get Tag Position
- Beautiful Soup - Encoding
- Beautiful Soup - Output Formatting
- Beautiful Soup - Pretty Printing
- Beautiful Soup - NavigableString Class
- Beautiful Soup - Convert Object to String
- Beautiful Soup - Convert HTML to Text
- Beautiful Soup - Parsing XML
- Beautiful Soup - Error Handling
- Beautiful Soup - Trouble Shooting
- Beautiful Soup - Porting Old Code
- Beautiful Soup - Functions Reference
- Beautiful Soup - contents Property
- Beautiful Soup - children Property
- Beautiful Soup - string Property
- Beautiful Soup - strings Property
- Beautiful Soup - stripped_strings Property
- Beautiful Soup - descendants Property
- Beautiful Soup - parent Property
- Beautiful Soup - parents Property
- Beautiful Soup - next_sibling Property
- Beautiful Soup - previous_sibling Property
- Beautiful Soup - next_siblings Property
- Beautiful Soup - previous_siblings Property
- Beautiful Soup - next_element Property
- Beautiful Soup - previous_element Property
- Beautiful Soup - next_elements Property
- Beautiful Soup - previous_elements Property
- Beautiful Soup - find Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_all Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_parents Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_parent Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_next_siblings Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_next_sibling Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_previous_siblings Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_previous_sibling Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_all_next Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_next Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_all_previous Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_previous Method
- Beautiful Soup - select Method
- Beautiful Soup - append Method
- Beautiful Soup - extend Method
- Beautiful Soup - NavigableString Method
- Beautiful Soup - new_tag Method
- Beautiful Soup - insert Method
- Beautiful Soup - insert_before Method
- Beautiful Soup - insert_after Method
- Beautiful Soup - clear Method
- Beautiful Soup - extract Method
- Beautiful Soup - decompose Method
- Beautiful Soup - replace_with Method
- Beautiful Soup - wrap Method
- Beautiful Soup - unwrap Method
- Beautiful Soup - smooth Method
- Beautiful Soup - prettify Method
- Beautiful Soup - encode Method
- Beautiful Soup - decode Method
- Beautiful Soup - get_text Method
- Beautiful Soup - diagnose Method
- Beautiful Soup Useful Resources
- Beautiful Soup - Quick Guide
- Beautiful Soup - Useful Resources
- Beautiful Soup - Discussion
Beautiful Soup - previous_element Property
Method Description
In Beautiful Soup library, the previous_element property returns the Tag or NavigableString that appears immediately prior to the current PageElement, even if it is out of the parent tree. There is also a previous property which has similar behaviour
Syntax
Element.previous_element
Return value
The previous_element and previous properties return a tag or a NavigableString appearing immediately before the current tag.
Example 1
In the document tree parsed from the given HTML string, we find the previous_element of the <p id='id1'> tag
html = ''' <p><b>Excellent</b><p>Python</p><p id='id1'>Tutorial</p></p> ''' from bs4 import BeautifulSoup soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml') tag = soup.find('p', id='id1') print (tag) pre = tag.previous_element print ("Previous:",pre) pre = tag.previous_element.previous_element print ("Previous:",pre)
Output
<p id="id1">Tutorial</p> Previous: Python Previous: <p>Python</p>
The output is a little strange as the previous element for shown to be 'Python, that is because the inner string is registered as the previous element. To obtain the desired result (<p>Python</p>) as the previous element, fetch the previous_element property of the inner NavigableString object.
Example 2
The BeautifulSoup PageElements also supports previous property which is analogous to previous_element property
html = ''' <p><b>Excellent</b><p>Python</p><p id='id1'>Tutorial</p></p> ''' from bs4 import BeautifulSoup soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml') tag = soup.find('p', id='id1') print (tag) pre = tag.previous print ("Previous:",pre) pre = tag.previous.previous print ("Previous:",pre)
Output
<p id="id1">Tutorial</p> Previous: Python Previous: <p>Python</p>
Example 3
In the next example, we try to determine the element next to <input> tag whose id attribute is 'age'
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup fp = open("index.html") soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, 'html5lib') tag = soup.find('input', id='age') pre = tag.previous_element.previous print ("Previous:",pre)
Output
Previous: <input id="nm" name="name" type="text"/>